“What?” Pei Zhao had not caught it clearly.
At that moment, the two of them were standing beneath the eaves of the Wutong Courtyard. Behind them, the rooms blazed with warm lamplight. Outside, the New Year’s snow was falling — the courtyard below them bright from the reflected light, which made the snow falling from the pitch-dark sky above seem as though it came from some vast and distant void. The servants were out in the courtyard setting off fireworks, and children ran back and forth laughing and shrieking. It was a scene of warmth and festive liveliness.
Ye Lingbo wore her fox-fur cape, her hands tucked inside her hand muff. The fur trim of the cape was being stirred by the wind and brushed against her face in soft wisps. At her side stood a tall and beautiful young man, like a divine figure, like a peacock, radiating the warmth of lamplight. Even Ye Lingbo, who had long seen through the nature of love in this world, felt one fleeting moment of self-pity.
She should not say it — saying it would shatter this one moment of warmth.
But she was, after all, Ye Lingbo.
“You refuse to strive,” she asked him with composure. “Is it because of what happened at the Mingsha River?”
When she wanted to ask something, she would let him make ten thousand jokes, and he would not escape the question.
Pei Zhao was silent for a long time. His profile was caught in the light. Before she had ever encountered him, Ye Lingbo had always assumed Cui Jingyu was the model of what a young general should be — until she laid eyes on him.
No matter how he pretended not to care, no matter how many careless jokes he made, Ye Lingbo knew — he cared more than Cui Jingyu did. He was more finely wrought and sensitive than Cui Jingyu. And so Cui Jingyu was a wolf or a bear, while Pei Zhao was a falcon. Anyone who had ever kept a hawk knew that birds of prey were in truth extraordinarily fragile creatures — just a few of their flight feathers damaged, and they could never fly as well again. Unlike a wolf king on the hunting ground who, even with half its body torn bloody, its wounds cut to the bone, could still fight and hunt in the snow, tear into its prey with bared teeth, and lift its head to look at you in silence.
And so Cui Jingyu could be enfeoffed, while Pei Zhao could not. He was also unwilling to attend the victory banquet, unwilling to be the desirable suitor at the Flower Festival Banquets.
This had been Ye Lingbo’s conjecture — but she had not expected Pei Zhao to actually answer.
Perhaps the lamplight tonight was too warm. Standing under the eaves, he answered Ye Lingbo with composure.
“I truly did pile grave mounds,” he told her. His eyes, seen from the side, had a quality like colored glass. “But in the northern frontier in winter, the ground is frozen as hard as iron — it simply cannot be dug. The entire river surface was covered in bodies, the riverbank blanketed with them. Left like that, they would have been food for wolves and vultures. The northern tribes called that sky burial. But we Han people believe that if a person’s body is not whole after death, they cannot be reincarnated. So I took the remaining dozen or so men and carried them all together, piled them up, and covered them with stones and packed snow. We worked for days — moving the bodies in daylight, taking turns keeping watch at night, because a pack of wolves was watching us from only ten paces away. When we had finished, I stood back and looked at what we had built, and it put me in mind of a passage I had read — about victory mounds built from the bodies of the enemy. That was the moment I truly understood — that is what war is. Enfeoffment, high office, these are things for the living. If you are dead, winning or losing makes no difference.”
It deserved a knock — this was not something to say during the New Year’s season — but for some reason Ye Lingbo could not say a single word. It was as though her throat had been frozen, and even to stir it would be painful.
Pei Zhao also knew these were not words to be said tonight. Although Ye Lingbo often played the part of someone worldly and seasoned, she ran her small courtyard like a general marshaling troops — but she was still, in the end, a sheltered young lady who had never seen blood.
This story, told aloud, would frighten her.
But he had not expected Ye Lingbo to take hold of his arm.
Her fingers were slender and long — beautiful hands by any measure. The knuckles bore faint calluses from years of writing and tallying accounts. The skin was delicate and pale jade-white. Those hands belonged inside the soft warmth of the fur hand muff, not reaching out into the cold wind.
But it was not until she took hold of his arm that Pei Zhao realized he had been trembling faintly.
Ye Lingbo raised her eyes and looked at him.
She was a full head shorter than he was, slender and slight, like a small creature wrapped in silk and fur — a deer, or perhaps a rabbit. But the gaze with which she looked at him, steadily and without wavering, was more calming than anything else in the world.
“The year my mother died, Yanyan was only seven years old. My birthday falls on the eighteenth day of the first month — I had just turned thirteen after the New Year. But Ye Qinglan had to go around calling on old family friends in the capital, had to navigate the matrons’ social circles, to stir their sympathies, to protect my mother’s dowry. And so I had to manage the household. At the time, all of the household’s money was kept in a mother-of-pearl box, and when I slept, I slept with it tucked under my head. Sometimes Ye Qinglan would stay at Aunt Meng’s house and could not come home, and the wet nurse had been dismissed. So I would sleep with Yanyan, and use a rope to tie her hand to mine — I was afraid she would be taken away while I slept.”
“None of that was the hardest part. What I remember most is the eve of the Minor New Year — Yanyan had been sick for a stretch of days before that. When my mother was alive, every Minor New Year was a grand occasion: many fine things to eat. But that year we could not even get the kitchen staff together. I thought at least I could send Liu Ji out to buy some pastry boxes from the market. I asked Yanyan which shop she wanted, and I was privately afraid she would say Yi Yi Fang — because Yi Yi Fang’s was the most expensive, called the ‘Eight Delicacies.’ And of course that is exactly what Yanyan asked for. Liu Ji could see I was troubled, and asked me whether I didn’t have enough money. The truth was that I did have the money. I was simply afraid to spend it. I didn’t know how much a whole year would cost, didn’t know how much longer this kind of life would continue. I was afraid of some unexpected calamity — what if Yanyan’s illness turned worse and required more expensive medicine, what if Ye Qinglan couldn’t collect this year’s shop earnings…”
She paused — her throat seemed to catch — but before Pei Zhao could offer any comfort, she pressed on, with a kind of calm and cold-eyed candor toward herself.
“So I had Liu Ji buy from Lanhua Dwelling instead. I still remember — Lanhua Dwelling’s was one liang and eight qian cheaper than Yi Yi Fang’s. I took the pastries and put them in a Yi Yi Fang box, and told Yanyan it was from Yi Yi Fang. Yanyan seemed not to taste the difference and was very happy. But that very night, her illness took a turn for the worse — she burned with fever all night. Ye Qinglan had been snowed in at the estate and could not return. Yang Niangzi had gone to fetch the doctor. I held Yanyan and sat there and wept the entire night — terrified, and full of regret. If she had died that night, I would have spent the rest of my life believing I was the worst elder sister in the world.”
Her eyes were brimming with tears, like stones submerged in water. Pei Zhao instinctively wanted to comfort her — but she tilted her chin up with stubborn defiance.
“But that was already seven years ago. Ye Qinglan and I took one year — just one year — to pull the family back together again. By the second New Year after that, it was already much the same as when my mother had been alive. Four years ago, when the owner of Yi Yi Fang lost a shipment in a sunken boat on the Tongzhou waterway and needed to sell the shop to pay his debts, I bought Yi Yi Fang outright for ten thousand taels of silver. From that point on, the finest pastries in the capital belonged to my family. Yanyan can have whatever pastry she wants, whenever she wants it…”
“You see, Pei Zhao.” She looked at him calmly and smiled — just a small curve of her lips. “There is no obstacle in this world that cannot be gotten through. Except for death, there is nothing that truly matters. As long as we are still alive, we can move forward. Even if a mountain stands in our way, we can find a way to move it. You may laugh at me for striving — and I laugh at you for standing still. The dead are already gone. To live forward, carrying their share alongside your own — that is what we are here to do.”
As if to answer her words, the courtyard erupted in a burst of fireworks at that very moment. The light blazed across her face — like the fierce and burning ambition within her. However ordinary a face, it shone as brilliant as a precious jewel.
It was Xiao Liu’er being disobedient, who had after all talked Liu Ji into lighting the grandest of the ‘Silver Flower Trees’ — a paper tower taller than a person. First a spark caught and flared, then spread, then in one breathtaking instant burst open all at once — like a fountain erupting upward, scattering dazzling light in every direction, throwing out countless bright sparks, as though a shower of golden rain were falling, illuminating half the courtyard to the brightness of day.
The whole courtyard rang with laughter. The children shrieked with joy. The two of them paused their conversation and looked up at the fireworks. Whether it was the Wutong Courtyard of seven years ago, or the banks of the Mingsha River four years ago — bathed in this shower of gold, all of it receded from the mind.
A moment like this deserved a poem. But Ye Lingbo could not think of one. She was not, in any case, someone given to reciting poetry.
“It would be nice if Ye Qinglan were here,” Ye Lingbo said wistfully. “She would certainly know which poem fits this moment.”
Pei Zhao smiled.
“Fire-trees and silver flowers glow crimson-bright, drums and pipes ring out to shake the spring night. New joy comes to hand amid a flurry of care, old memories startle the heart — echoes of dreams, half-there.” When he recited a poem in earnest, he was beautiful in that way too — smiling in the firelight with crescent eyes, tilting his head slightly to look down at Ye Lingbo. Had he taken the imperial examinations, he would surely have earned the rank of Most Elegant Graduate.
Ye Lingbo lifted her chin with aristocratic composure.
“Not pleasing at all,” she said. She was not criticizing the poem itself — only the one reciting it.
Pei Zhao was not offended in the least, only smiled, his gaze resting on her attentively — something like mist swirling deep within his pupils.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Ye Lingbo said, somewhat out of sorts.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen you in red,” said Pei Zhao with a smile. “It truly is lovely.”
Ye Lingbo knew perfectly well it was merely a polite thing to say — and yet she was pleased by it all the same. Otherwise she would not have found it impossible to sharpen even her tone of dismissal. “Of course it’s red for the New Year,” she said. “What else would one wear — dressed like you all the time, nothing but teal, walking around like a bundle of pale green bamboo shoots. What a terrible omen.”
“It is not that I am fond of teal,” said Pei Zhao, smiling at her. “I simply do not like wearing red.” A pause. “But if Ye Young Miss were to make it, I would wear it.”
Perhaps it was the heavy scent of gunpowder smoke — for some unaccountable reason, Ye Lingbo felt a sudden shortness of breath, as though she could not quite meet his gaze. She turned her face away.
“What a pretty dream you’ve had. Who knows what year or month it would be before I make you another set of clothes — not when you spend all your time making things difficult for me. Go be your own beggar.”